The European Space Agency (Technical and Quality Management Directorate and Concurrent Design Facility) in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) is organising the 7th International Systems & Concurrent Engineering for Space Applications Conference at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Aeronáutica y del Espacio (ETSIAE) of Madrid, on 5-6-7 October 2016.

Held on a biannual basis, the Conference is designed to foster exchange of ideas, experiences, lessons learned and future trends in the area of Systems and Concurrent Engineering (SE&CE), for agencies, companies, organizations, universities and institutes involved in space and related activities.

The first two editions of the Concurrent Engineering Workshops (CEW) were held at ESTEC in 2004 and 2006, focussing on the novelties of the early Concurrent Engineering design centres, methodology and applications.

In 2008 the Workshop objectives were expanded to the vast field of Systems Engineering (SE), and the event was named SECESA: “Systems Engineering and Concurrent Engineering for Space Applications”.

Since then, SECESA has been hosted at different European University premises, and co-organised by academia chosen via a formal selection process. This approach enables the Universities to showcase specific areas or projects where students are excelling at utilising SE and CE approaches as well as accomplishing the Agency educational objective of inspiring young generations of engineers with new methodology and approaches for Systems Engineering by facilitating their participation to the technical sessions.

La Sapienza University of Rome welcomed SECESA 2008 for the first time outside ESTEC; SECESA 2010 was hosted by the EPFL in Lausanne (Switzerland); SECESA 2012 was held in Lisbon (Portugal), at the Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), with the innovative element of including in the programme the contents of the NASA-ESA Workshop on Product Data Exchange, via a dedicated session. The Institute of Space Systems (IRS) of the University of Stuttgart hosted SECESA 2014, the first edition where the event was officially designated with the appellative of “Conference”, acknowledgment of a well-established forum of excellence, reference for the Systems and Concurrent Engineering community, in Europe and abroad.